After you apply for advertisement you are contacted by a Recruitment Coordinator. This person does not work out of the same offices as the main Agoda office - They have an Agoda email address, but the this is an outsourced role. You then have 2 or 3 Skype interviews (I has 2) where you discuss architecture and management, and also the main question - why do you want to come to Thailand.
When they interview you they have pet questions. The questions are designed to make you squirm. But interestingly if you do not supply them the correct answer, say you don't know or do not come up with the solution that they want, they then proceed to help you. Usually in an interview, if the interviewer helps you - the process is all but over. A few times this happened in the skype interview, I thought that this would end the process. But then they flew me to Bangkok for face to face interview.
Bangkok is hot, sweaty and quite nasty place. If you are coming from 1st world country, there is a reason that the cost of living is low in Thailand. There is no value on human life. No workplace health and safety standards means that everything is done in a half assed way. If you have any hint of OCD or enjoy seeing order, Bangkok will freak you out.
Agoda fits into this environment perfectly. They have no respect for your time, and they as disorganised as a Bangkok street corner. They have many staff from India and Ukraine, which are countries where Bangkok represents an improvement in standard of living.
Agoda interview process itself is like Bangkok. Every single interview and meeting was screwed up in some way. It either started late, rescheduled, or just cancelled all together. I was flown into Bangkok on the wednesday AM, the first interview was not until Thursday at 2pm. Then the interviews that were scheduled for the friday were completely cancelled at last minute. I figured that they had made their decision already. After contact the Recruitment Coordinator they assured me that there were some scheduling challenging challenges. You would think that after flying me into Bangkok, and putting me up at a 5 star hotel for 3 nights they could prioritise some time to see me.
Saturday morning I send my email to withdraw my application. I cited reasons that I believe that Agoda to too disorganised, and disrespectful. I did not want to work for them. I received a form letter. "At this time, we have decided to concentrate our attention on other candidates who we believe best meet the current needs of our organization. Please be assured that your application was given full consideration."
Make sure you know about their pet queuing technologies - Kafka is the answer to many of their questions
More questions that did not fit:
Q. How do you introduce TDD or Code reviews into a team.
Q. What are good KPIs for software developers.
Q. What people personalities/skills would you pick to build a perfect software development 10 person team.
Q. You have a scrum team where the business needs change more often than sprint length. How do you change scrum process to handle such fast changing business needs
Technology: - Scala back end, ASP.NET front end
Org Structure: CTO -> VP -> Dev Managers -> Scrum master -> team members. Although it looks quite heiracheral the scrum masters do not have too much management authority, and dev manager looks after team members. Moves them around depending on project
If you have a bad job in a third world country and used to being treated badly, then Agoda is for you. It will be a step up. Otherwise avoid
